>> Every language has grammar rules. They are in the minds of speakers of the language — including, for English, me. The fact that they weren't decided by an official edict doesn't mean these rules are a trivial matter; demanding people change their grammar rules is an affront.
It's an interesting observation. Speakers of a language often (always?) have a strong feeling of what is right and wrong in the language, and this feeling is not usually formally justified. People just know how to speak right- and hearing an incorrect expression feels jarring.
Stallman has touched on something deep here, and although his insistence to pick at it is probably part and parcel of his personality, it is not an unreasonable insistence. Unusual use of pronouns is likely to make many people feel uncomfortable.
> You may unilaterally think that's wrong because you wish to impose a set of rules on language that others don't share, but that's not how meaning works.
'A set of rules' is called grammar. It may have arisen organically and out of 'shared consensus' but today languages only make sense when we maintain that grammar.
Imagine if the positions of the words in the above sentence were randomly jumbled up. It'd make no sense at all.
English is somewhat more lax than other languages about grammar (stemming from its extremely wide usage) while still being able to get the point through, but striving for correct grammar should always be a goal, even if 'the point has got through'.
Many other stricter and older Indo-European languages that haven't experienced as many changes as English has, can be machine-parsed like a programming language. Sanskrit and Latin come to mind.
> it's a hodge-podge of a language with inconsistencies down to the root.
We fix that one inconsistency at a time. This man is doing his part, despite all the naysayers.
I don't really give a shit about things like split infinitives but if you've ever seen a person struggle with speaking on a subject without the vocabulary to do so, you know how much it cripples them. Grammar is the same way. Why do descriptivists think it's ok to force everyone to invent language on the spot when people are in dire need?
>> However, language use changes over time, of course, and it's absurd to try to prevent that.
I agree, totally. Different people have a different sense of what is right and wrong to say. I'm guessing that is how languages change over time.
But the fact remains that there are things that are very likely to be nearly universally received as wrong. For example, if I say "My mother will eats here tonight" - most people will wonder why I don't say "eat", etc.
Equally, hearing or reading someone use a pronoun like "ey" or "zie" that are not part of what the majority of English speakers will recognise as English is likely to raise an objection from many. I assume listeners or readers who have only a fleeting familiarity with non-binary people, though this may be a bit unrealistic, given the internet etc.
> not every person speaking english uses an identical grammar. It seems reasonable to assume that at least some people don't notice the difference/s. The incorrect form must not be significantly more difficult to use because it's being used.
Not every variation of grammar is equally possible or usable. It's a philosophical argument, a fantasy of (rebellion?), to reject all practices and rules and preferences as arbitrary and therefore to be ignored. Some are arbitrary, some are obsolete, but many have real reasons, value, and impact.
From David Adger, professor of linguistics, Queen Mary University of London:
"People have a notion of grammar as being a set of rules that someone tells you to do. ... I want to say, 'No, look at the amazing complexity of languages around the world, and look at how unified it all is.'"
"There's an unlimited number of even numbers but obviously they’re limited, right? Because 3s and 7s aren't in there. Language is like that. There's an unlimited number of possible things we can say, of sentence structures, but not anything can be a sentence structure. ... Language is unlimited, but it’s unlimited in a limited way."
> I'm a bit confused about what point you're making. Are you talking about individuals "naturally" preferring the correct grammar -- as opposed to learning it? Or the grammar has developing over time?
I'm saying the great majority of explicitly learned/taught grammar is not arbitrary or obsolete, but has developed from study and practical experience of what is used and what works well (and what doesn't).
> You don’t get to redefine language and force your linguistic preferences on others. That’s not how language works.
I don't particularly care about rehashing the ethics of preferred pronouns right now, but what you've described is exactly how language works. You might look into why standard practice moved away from capitalizing nouns in the 19th century.
> Worse, nowadays you have all the problems of misaddressing and offending folks.
Languages are tightly inherited, even more so than genes. How languages are structured varies highly. Some have gender-like tenses for the cardinal directions, where things are not feminine but 'northy'. Some have no genders, but do have time-like tenses, where things are 'future-y' or 'present-y'. Just look at sign-language, with it's use of height similar to an exclamation point in English at times. Human communication is weird.
Even in English, our sense of gender has changed over time. It used to be that we cared more about the number of items/people over their gender, but now we care about the gender. IE: Thee/Thou/You/ became Him/Her/You.
English is, herself, a pidgin language. The irregularity of the verbs and the reliance on context make it very accommodating to new terms and nouns, but VERY difficult to learn fluently. It is standardizing though, the Afro/Urban-American vernacular use of 'be' is a perfect example (I be going to the store, not, I am going to the store). This change of 'be' is very similar to the romance languages. English is very slowly being wrenched into standardization. It will be very interesting to see how Chinese and Computer Programming languages affect English.
The Story of English is a great look into this language and it's story:
> why wouldn't they parrot things like woke pronouns
Because different languages have different pronouns. You don't adopt function words into your language the same way you can adopt content words (unless you're, for example, code switching, but even then you don't switch for a single function word).
> an argument that we should use words as we damn well please instead of having a common standard that would allow us to understand each other
Bit of an exaggeration, don’t you think?
Every single person has a language that’s unique to them, and there’s a tremendous amount of both redundancy and context, cultural and situational, that need to exist to convey meaning.
Obviously increasing deviation from the “standard” lexicon or “laws” of universal grammar would at some point fail to convey any meaning whatsoever, but given the context of this discussion, we’re not discussing egregious violations - merely creative and valid use of existing words which, if you read the other comments, is already standard in industry.
My role frequently requires me to explain nuanced technical details to less technical folks or those with differing technical expertise. Even in the same building, between native English speaking coworkers using language in a fully “standard” way, when sharing ideas, there needs to be a back and forth discussion to reduce ambiguity and converge into a commonly held mental abstraction for whatever it is being discussed.
Don’t believe me? Why do you think legalese exists? Legalese should be the culmination of precision in conveying meaning, but even with legalese, it’s up to the value systems and judgements of courts and judges to interpret the law.
Language is complicated. Try not to be too uptight about it. Have a beer. Relax.
>> English and the small set of other high-resource languages are in many ways
not representative of the world's other languages. Many resource-rich
languages belong to the Indo-European language family, are spoken mostly in
the Western world, and are morphologically poor, i.e. information is mostly
expressed syntactically, e.g. via a fixed word order and using multiple
separate words rather than through variation at the word level.
I thought I'd give an example of this for readers who don't speak many
languages other than English. My native language is Greek, which is an
Indo-European language, but it has some morphological intricacies that make it
more complicated to learn and use (as a second language and from what I'm told
of course) than English.
For example, in Greek, nouns have a gender [1]: masculine, feminine or neuter.
For instance, "the dog" is "? s?????" ("the male dog") while "the cat" is "?
??ta" (the female cat). However, grammmatical gender is not necessarily fixed
so one can also say "? s???a" ("the female dog") or "? ??t??" ("the male
cat"). So there is a word-root ("s???-" for dog, "?at-" for cat) that is then
modified by a termination, typically -??, -? -? for the nominative of each
gender. The terminations change depending on the declention, for example the
genetive for "s?????" is "s?????" and the generative for "s???a" is "s???a?",
etc. The termination also changes to denote number, singular or plural
(ancient Greek also used to have a dual number, used to refer to pairs of
nouns). Terminations vary depending on number according to gender and
declention. So for example the plural of "s?????" is "s?????", genetive
"s?????" and the plural of "s???a" is "s???e?", genetive "s?????".
Compare this with English where a dog is a dog is a dog, there is only one
plural form, "dogs" and there is only one genetive form "dog's" or "dogs'" for
each number. And a female dog is either a circumlocution, "female dog" or an
entirely new word, "bitch", with its own simple set of transformations for
number and genitive "bitches" and "bitch's" or "bitches'". Basically, changing
meaning in English can be represented by adding a few words to a vocabulary-
but changing meaning in Greek requires manipulating words at the structural
level.
There are probably a few counter-examples to the above but my understanding is
that this is how it works for the most part. And this, in particular the
abilty of English to represent more meanings with more words, might go some
way to explain why approaches that work best with large datasets tend to be
favoured in English NLP.
Edit: not an NLP expert or a linguist so corrections welcome, of course!
______________
[1] Other Indo-European languages also have genders but the interesting thing
is that those genders don't always match, between languages. This is an
endless source of confusion for foreign language learners. For example I speak
French from an early age and I only realised much later in life that Greek and
French do not always use the same gender for the same nouns, even though I'd
been using the right genders in my speech. For example, both "dog" and "cat"
are masculine in French: "le chien" and "le chat". But while I always used "le
chat" correctly, I always thought of it in my mind as "? ??ta", the feminine
Greek noun. Human language is weird!
> When most native English speakers think about "bad grammar", what they actually are referring to are a combination of dialectical differences and archaic rules that rarely were ever true grammatical rules—more of stylistic preferences that have to be taught precisely because they aren't a part of colloquial speech.
You've said this in a couple of comments, at least, but what is it based on? To my knowledge and in my experience, the 'rules' of grammar arose from the study of language as it is used.
Could you give some examples of artificial rules?
Edit: Also there are universal aspects to grammar, found in completely disconnected cultures, strongly implying an inherited foundation to them. Here's a non-exhaustive list based on Donald Brown's Human Universals, the seminal book on such things, language and otherwise. Unfortunately, not much detail here on grammar, but my point is more about the inherited, not learned or created, nature of much language. (The categorization is by me, not Brown.)
* Grammar
* Semantics
* Semantic category of affecting things and people
* Semantic category of dimension
* Semantic category of giving
* Semantic category of location
* Semantic category of motion
* Semantic category of other physical properties
* Semantic components
* Semantic components, generation
* Semantic components, sex
* Vowel contrasts
* Nouns
* Personal names
* Pronouns
* Pronouns, minimum two numbers
* Pronouns, minimum three persons
* Proper names
* Verbs
* Numerals (counting)
* Antonyms
* Metonym
* Morphemes
* Polysemy (one word has several meanings)
* Phonemes
* Phonemes defined by set of minimally constrasting features
* Phonemes, merging of
* Phonemes, range from 10 to 70 in number
* Phonemic change, inevitability of
* Phonemic change, rules of
* Phonemic system
* Vocalic/nonvocalic contrasts in phonemes
* Contrasting marked and nonmarked sememes meaningful elements in language)
* Markedness
* Onomatopoeia
* Synonyms
* Sememes, commonly used ones are short, infrequently used ones Are longer
* Possessive, intimate
* Possessive, loose
* Translatable
* Stop/nonstop contrasts (in speech sounds)
* Words
* Age terms
* Black (color term)
* Face (word for)
* Father and mother, separate kin terms for
* Hand (word for)
* One (numeral)
* Two (numeral)
* Units of time
* White (color term)
* Techniques
* Abstraction in speech & thought
* Baby talk
* Figurative speech
* Linguistic redundancy
* Marking at phonemic, syntactic, and lexical levels
* Metaphor
* Synesthetic metaphors
* Not a simple reflection of reality
* Symbolism
* Symbolic speech
EDIT2: For those wondering, a 'marked' word is the non-default one in a binary pair of words. For example, for author & authoress, 'author' could mean any gender and is therefore 'unmarked'; 'authoress' specifies only women is therefore 'marked'. Or in a more interesting example, "In the case of 'wide' and 'narrow', 'wide' is the unmarked word: asking 'How wide is the road?' does not suggest that the road is wide, but asking 'How narrow is the road?' does suggest that the road is narrow."
My impression (I'm not an expert at all) is that 'marked' words and unmarked words also are associated with specific kinds of sounds or structures.
> which is why it's even more important to make sure we're actually talking about the same things.
To some extent, but it is also impossible to do so perfectly.
> Semantics matter.
Semantic agreement is limited to the actual parties to the communication, and by location, place, time, and social context. You wouldn't explain something to a 5 year old the way you would a 25 year old and the same basic problems occur when you cross cultural or temporal boundaries.
When linguists discuss language, they usually start by pointing out that human language is defined by usage, not by prescriptions regarding definitions or grammar. This is a critical difference between natural languages and computer languages. Computer languages rigidly conform to specifications. Natural languages only approximate the rules we use to describe them.
So I think you are expecting too much from human communications.
> So I think the difference is of substance because it has vastly different psychological properties (more than just thin syntactic sugar).
Right, it's not just syntactic sugar, it's also the type system, and it may also touch on the run-time system. I think we've been in violent agreement from the beginning but I just didn't realise it. I interpreted your language as being somewhat combative and that put me on the defensive.
> The language you speak is the result of thousands of years of casual communication by billions of human beings.
Disagree. The language I speak didn't exist 800 years ago. The Anglo-saxons wouldn't have understood me, and I wouldn't have understood them.
And there were barely a billion human beings just 800 years ago - forget about thousands of years.
I didn't mention "prescriptivism", although it's obviously the opposite of descriptivism.
I thiink you mistake "prescriptivism" for a sort of law-making,like grammar-nazis. I mean something more like a general acceptance that words do have particular meanings, and that it's possible to be wrong about the meaning or use of a word.
> That middle-endianness is spoken doesn’t make it better. It’s still crazy.
The english language—and every other real-world spoken language—is full of rules and exceptions that make absolutely zero logical sense. How far down this road do you want to go?
As long as we speak in a specific order, I don't think it's crazy at all to write in that same order. After all, normal written sentences follow the spoken order of words, too.
>> But a tool that could understand my intent and then propose restructured or similar sentences and words that convey the same meaning could be a true killer application.
Yeah but that's hard though. Who knows what is your intent when you're generating an utterance, written or spoken? Sometimes you yourself may even read what you wrote (or hear what you said) and wonder what you meant.
Not to mention what an absolute nightmare it would be, trying to compile data on the linguistic intent behind utterances! How do you even start to collect that? Ask people to say things, then ask them what they meant... but what did they mean when they explain what they meant in the first instance?
The worse thing is that the very notion of what is grammatical changes with context. For instance, to go back to dropping the "the"'s: imagine you read the phrase "eat soup with spoon". Is that an ungrammatical form of "eat the soop with the spoon", or is it an instruction, perhaps something you'd find in a soup-eating manual, which therefore is perfectly valid as a terse form of English?
What you intend an utterance to mean affects whether it is grammatical and the grammaticality of the utterance affects its meaning. Nice, eh?
> There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and the rest with only modest effort.
…uh, French? English has such a huge amount of French vocabulary that it does not take a huge amount of effort for an English speaker like me to, say, read a Wikipedia page in French, despite my limited knowledge of the language. Pronunciation is a different matter, however, that's true.
> it’s us who are odd: almost all European languages belong to one family – Indo-European – and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders that way.
Might be weird from an Indo-European perspective. But consider this: firstly, it's not like other IE languages' grammatical gender isn't being simplified. Maybe it hasn't been eliminated yet, but English is not a complete oddball here.
Second, lacking grammatical gender is hardly unusual once you go outside Indo-European!
> There is exactly one language on Earth whose present tense requires a special ending only in the third-person singular.
English has a small and not very expressive set of verb inflections, okay. It's not alone there. Yes, maybe other languages don't have inflections limited in that specific way, but that kind of specificity is far from unusual.
> English started out as, essentially, a kind of German.
Well… Germanic doesn't really mean German. Old English does look somewhat familiar to a German speaker, though.
> In linguistics circles it’s risky to call one language ‘easier’ than another one, for there is no single metric by which we can determine objective rankings. But even if there is no bright line between day and night, we’d never pretend there’s no difference between life at 10am and life at 10pm.
Languages are not “easier” or “harder” in isolation. What matters is how similar a language is to those already know. The author does nothing to refute this and comes up with the bizarre concept that “English is ‘easier’ than other Germanic languages”… how so? I could make a convincing argument that English is significantly harder than other Germanic languages, for instance.
> normal languages don’t dangle prepositions in this way
What's the author's idea of “normal” here? Latin?
> the has no specifically masculine form to match man […] strangeness
Arabic has no masculine form of “the”. Is it weird?
> English got hit by a firehose spray of words from yet more languages
As opposed to other languages, which never import possibly duplicative vocabulary en masse? Japanese has a lot of Chinese vocabulary alongside native words, for an easy example. And this is hardly unique to Japan.
> The very idea of etymology being a polyglot smorgasbord, each word a fascinating story of migration and exchange, seems everyday to us. But the roots of a great many languages are much duller.
But the roots of a great many other languages are similarly interesting!
----
This tells you various interesting (and correct!) facts about English's history which a student of historical linguistics could tell you, and maybe that's good, it could get more people interested in the subject! It utterly fails at proving its thesis though. English is a bit of an outlier, but it's not a unique one. Of course, you could argue that no other language has the same combination of weirdnesses, but that's because they're different languages!
It's an interesting observation. Speakers of a language often (always?) have a strong feeling of what is right and wrong in the language, and this feeling is not usually formally justified. People just know how to speak right- and hearing an incorrect expression feels jarring.
Stallman has touched on something deep here, and although his insistence to pick at it is probably part and parcel of his personality, it is not an unreasonable insistence. Unusual use of pronouns is likely to make many people feel uncomfortable.
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